Sunday, June 05, 2011

FCRC : Awards Banquet

I got to FCRC a little early to attend the ACM Awards Reception and Banquet. (Les Valiant nicely put my name on a list.) For more on the awards you can also go the ACM award page. They have a nice little award booklet they gave out at the reception, but it looks like last year's is still up on the page -- I imagine they'll update it soon. They also had copies of the latest Communications of the ACM out, which is sporting a cover with an extremely nice picture of Les on it.

It was a very nice and extremely well-run event. It was black-tie optional, and I was one of the half in a regular tie. It's odd to see that many computer scientists I know in a tux -- certainly not something I've ever seen before! It was at the Fairmont, in a suitably-large-sized space, and with much better food than I was expecting (and after flying all day, I was suitably hungry to enjoy it). While there were a lot of awards to go through, they kept it moving along quite quickly, so it didn't drag on at all. (I'd like to thank the award-winners, for keeping their speeches both short and entertaining.) The theory highlights were of course Les for the Turing Award, but also Craig Gentry received the Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work on fully homomorphic encryption, and Kurt Melhorn received the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for his work leading to LEDA. Bryan Parno, a Harvard undergrad and CMU grad student, received the Doctoral Dissertation Award. On the systems side, Frans Kaashoek received the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award. And of course there were the new ACM Fellows.